John Boehner is Resigning

Speaker John Boehner has announced that he is stepping down. This is huge news. He’ll resign from Congress altogether.

Boehner has increasingly faced a Republican House of Representatives unwilling to continue to support him.

In the past few months, conservatives have had more and more substantive talks with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy who, though he hasn’t blessed a coup, has largely turned a blind eye. Increasingly, Boehner alienated the hawks, the fiscal conservatives, and the social conservatives over not just his deals, but his failures of leadership.

Conservatives determined they could no longer do business with Boehner and Congressman Mark Meadows dropped a Motion to Vacate the Chair. Prior to the August recess it looked like Boehner could survive it. But plotting over the recess made it clear it was less and less likely that Boehner had the votes.

A clear warning sign was a few weeks ago when his friend and loyal ally, Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, signaled that he thought Boehner was at the end of the line.

This morning Boehner told his colleagues that he would be resigning.

Related

About the author

Erick Erickson

Read more

I don’t mean to dwell on this subject, but I continue to worry about both Phil Anschutz and the Weekly Standard. I worry about the Standard because it is a wonderful braintrust of right-of-center talent that covers not just politics and news, but culture so well. I worry about Phil Anschutz because I’ve always viewed him as a good caretaker of conservatism and scuttling the Weekly...

Republicans actually had a pretty good night last night with the Senate, the Georgia Governor’s race, the two seats in Florida, the Ohio Governor’s race, etc. In fact, Democrats could not flip a single seat in the House that Trump carried by 55% or more. The truth is, Donald Trump may be abnormal in his behaviors as a politician, but politically he is not that abnormal. If anything...

Democrats picked up the United States House of Representatives, flipped seven state legislative chambers, added six states where Democrats now control both the state legislature and Governor’s Mansion, and the three states that put Trump over the finish line (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) all elected Democrat Governors and Senators. But Republicans made gains in the Senate in...

All politics should be local, but President Trump himself has insisted it is like he is on the ballot. And he is right. Today is a nationalized election about Donald Trump and depending on where you live it will have major implications for Democrats and Republicans. In urban and suburban areas, there has been a decided shift away from President Trump. That will impact House races and more likely...